A crash course in Gravity and 1000 Views!

"It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet." Wernher von Braun

Gravity.

Gravity is what keeps us stable, down on the ground. Without it things would ... well float. Everyday objects would not stay down. Your coffee would not be drinkable out of an everyday cup (it requires gravity to tip into your mouth.). People wouldn't stay on the earth like they do today, the earth would not orbit the sun and the sun would not have even been created. So much universal processes require gravity ... and some times we just take it for granted that it's even there.

Gravity is the attractive force between a body and another body each with masses. The amount of gravity is affected by the distance between the two bodies and can be described in this equation:

Where F is the force of gravity between the two bodies,

G is the 'Universal Gravitational Constant' which equals: 6.67300 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2

^{M1 and M2 are the two bodies for which the attractive force is being measured between,
and r is the distance between the two objects.}

Through this equation we can measure the average gravitational attraction between the Earth and it's moon:

The Earth's mass is: 5.9742*10^24 kg.

The Moon's mass is: 7.36*10^22 kg.

The distance between the two is 384400 km.

So the gravitational attraction is: 1.985*10^26 N (Newtons)

Pretty cool huh?

This is how scientists can find out things like the weight of the Earth, or the weight of the moon by re-arranging such equations.

This has been a fairly short post about gravity but I'll continue on the topic of gravity over the next few posts.

For now I want to say thanks for reading our blog since we have reached a milestone of 1000 views!

Thanks for reading everyone and I hope you'll continue reading in the future, Chris.